Department of Medical Oncology, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Álvaro del Portillo, 21, 00128, Rome, Italy.
Medical Oncology Unit, IRCCS-Istituto Tumori "Giovanni Paolo II" of Bari, 70124, Bari, Italy.
J Exp Clin Cancer Res. 2020 May 27;39(1):95. doi: 10.1186/s13046-020-01601-2.
In a large number of cancer types, treatment selection depends on the presence of specific tumor biomarkers. Due to the dynamic nature of cancer, very often these predictive biomarkers are not uniformly present in all cancer cells. Tumor heterogeneity represents indeed one of the main causes of therapeutic failure, and its decoding remains a major ongoing challenge in the field.Liquid biopsy is the sampling and analysis of non-solid biological tissue often through rapid and non-invasive methods, which allows the assessment in real-time of the evolving landscape of cancer. Samples can be obtained from blood and most other bodily fluids. A blood-based liquid biopsy can capture circulating tumor cells and leukocytes, as well as circulating tumor-derived nucleic acids.In this review, we discuss the current and possibly future applications of blood-based liquid biopsy in oncology, its advantages and its limitations in clinical practice. We specifically focused on its role as a tool to capture tumor heterogeneity in metastatic cancer patients.
在大量癌症类型中,治疗选择取决于特定肿瘤生物标志物的存在。由于癌症的动态性质,这些预测性生物标志物往往并非均匀存在于所有癌细胞中。肿瘤异质性确实是治疗失败的主要原因之一,其解码仍然是该领域的一个主要挑战。液体活检是通过快速和非侵入性方法对非固体生物组织进行采样和分析,从而实时评估癌症的不断变化的特征。样本可以从血液和大多数其他体液中获得。基于血液的液体活检可以捕获循环肿瘤细胞和白细胞,以及循环肿瘤衍生的核酸。在这篇综述中,我们讨论了基于血液的液体活检在肿瘤学中的当前和可能的未来应用,以及它在临床实践中的优势和局限性。我们特别关注它作为一种工具在转移性癌症患者中捕获肿瘤异质性的作用。